Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I remember pointing out to him, I was like, well, computation is your turtle. And I think it's a weird turtle to have.
It's totally fine to have a turtle. Everyone has a turtle. You can't build a theory without a turtle. So it depends on the problem you want to describe. And actually, the reason I can't get behind... Steven's ontology is I don't know what question he's trying to answer. And without a question to answer, I don't understand why you're building a theory of reality.
Well, I started working on the origin of life. And I think what my challenge was there was no one knew what life was. And so you can't really talk about the origination of something if you don't know what it is. And so the way I would approach it is if you want to understand what life is, then proving that physics is solving the origin of life.
So there's the theory of what life is, but there's the actual demonstration that that theory is an accurate description of the phenomena you aim to describe. So again, they're the same problem. It's not like I can decouple origin of life from what life is. It's like that is the problem.
um and i the the point i guess i'm making about having a question is no matter what slice of reality you take what regularity of nature you're going to try to describe there will be there there will be an abstraction that unifies that structure of reality um hopefully um and and that will have a fundamental layer to it right because you have to explain something in terms of something else.
But so if I want to explain life, for example, then my fundamental description of nature has to be something I think that has to do with time being fundamental. But if I wanted to describe, I don't know, the sort of interactions of matter and light, you know, I have elementary particles be fundamental.
If I want to describe electricity and magnetism in the 1800s, I have to have waves be fundamental, right? So like you are in quantum mechanics, like it's a wave function that's fundamental because that's the sort of explanatory paradigm of your theory, right? So I guess I don't know what problem saying computation is fundamental solves.
Well, I think that the issue is general relativity and quantum mechanics are expressed in mathematical languages. Mm-hmm. And then computation is a mathematical language. So you're basically saying that maybe there's a more universal mathematical language for describing theories of physics that we already know. That's an important question.
And I do think that's what Stephen's trying to do and do well. But then the question becomes, does that formulation of a more universal language for describing the laws of physics that we know now tell us anything new about the nature of reality? Or is it a language? Yeah.
The language itself is never the fundamental thing. It's whatever it's describing.
I think if assembly theory is an accurate depiction of the physics of life, it should shed a lot of light on those problems. And in fact, I sometimes wonder if the problems of consciousness and intelligence are at all different than the problem of life generally.
And I'm of two minds of it, but I in general try to, you know, like the process of my thinking is trying to regularize everything into one theory. So pretty much every interaction I have is like, oh, how do I fold that into? And like, so I'm just building this giant abstraction that's basically trying to take every piece of data I've ever gotten in my brain into a theory of what life is.
And consciousness and intelligence are obviously some of the most interesting things that life has manifest. And so I think they're very telling about some of the deeper features about the nature of life.
Like this use of flavors, the same as you meant when you were talking about flavors of alien life.
Yeah. But we were talking about in terms of colors and like very nondescript. But the way that you just talked about flavors now is more in like the space of consciousness and intelligence. It was kind of like much more specific.
Quantifying flavors.
Depending on what you want to explain, as I was saying before, you have to assume something's fundamental. And so because people can't explain consciousness, there's a temptation for some people to want to take consciousness as fundamental and assume everything else is derived out of that. And then you get some people that want to assume consciousness preceded life.
And I don't find either of those views particularly illuminating. Because I don't want to assume a feminology before I explain a thing. And so what I've tried really hard to do is not assume that I think life is anything.
Except hold on to sort of the patterns and structures that seem to be the sort of consistent ways that we talk about this thing and then try to build a physics that describes that. And I think that's a really different approach than saying, you know, consciousness is this thing, you know, we all feel and experience about things.
I would want to understand the regularities associated with that and build a deeper structure underneath that and build into it. I wouldn't want to assume that thing and that I understand that thing, which is usually how I see people talk about it.
Showing 361–380 of 510 · page 19 of 26
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